THIS MACHINE MOCKS FASCISTS

Oy, Monday

Because I know you were wondering, Monday is my busiest work day, generally speaking. There’s the book quota, which will may or my not take me up to noon, and then when I’m done with that I shift to the filmcritic.com column, which needs to be finished by five pm. In between that I’m fielding e-mails and taking care of ancillary personal business, and now, at a little after 7pm, I’m going through my SFWA-related stuff, of which I am, I regret to say, a little behind and need to catch up.

All of which is to say, this is my excuse for making the first post of the day at 7:20 pm.

Mind you, I prefer this sort of situation to the alternative. I remember what it’s like to have all too much time on one’s hands. This is better.

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43 thoughts on “Oy, Monday”

Aside from a slowly building headache, not too bad. I’m ending one of the more successful periods of writing I’ve had in a long time, my health is good, work is fine, and I’m listening to new music. Hard to complain.

It was Monday, amplified by lack of sleep because I dreamed of the Zombie Apocalypse last night, woke up from that and couldn’t to back to sleep for over two hours. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if my alarm hadn’t gone off at 6 a.m. The snooze alarm was my friend this morning, but I finally had to get up and get to work becuase, like you, John, I work from home and am responsible for keeping myself on task. Because, you know, no work means no pay.

My Monday was mostly forgettable. Basically, we all were trying to get enough stuff done so that we wouldn’t have anything critical not done over the next couple of days. Either that, or everyone was just waiting for the inevitable to happen – statewide snow day! My plan for tomorrow – break out the camera and find a yardstick to measure the snow, if I can see anything. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a true blizzard warning.

Six hours to reinstall a laptop. 1/3 of that was data copying to and from the fileserver (yay 100 Mbit), and most of the rest was reinstalling two versions of Visual Studio that aren’t in the standard image of Win7.

Also, blizzard warning starting at 0600 tomorrow. 1-2 feet of snow plus half an inch of ice if the scariest Cassandras are right.

Spent my Monday morning in a courtroom with two of my least favorite opponents, followed by a Monday afternoon of telephone calls of people who didn’t listen and one guy who was a smarmy, sarcastic jerk. Other than THAT, it was fine.

Let’s see, on the plus side I managed to collect 50% of some money my former employer has owed me since this summer. On the minus side my mechanic called & offered to give me a little bit of money if I bring him the title to my car so he can tow it to the scrap yard (who builds an engine that destroys itself when the timing belt breaks??)

For the uninitiated, one can design an internal combustion engine so that the valves, when pushed down, either are hit by the piston coming up (interference), or the piston never comes up as high as a fully depressed valve (non-interference). With an interference engine, if your timing belt/gear/chain/whatever breaks, you bust off many or most of the valves, damage the pistons, and often the head and cylinders. Write off the engine, and in many cases the car if it’s not pretty new or expensive.

There’s not always an advantage to designing interference engines; most engine makers just assume timing belts/chains/gears/whatever break rarely enough that it’s ok if the outcome of that is “wrecked engine”. Some engine makers have a clue, and just always do non-interference. But it’s not seen as a technical or marketing advantage to do that, so it only matters in that if you buy the right models, you’re just lucky and that never happens to you.

(Currently dealing with a junked-out former commuter that had a head gasket leak and warped head…).

Hubby’s out of town until tomorrow night (he left yesterday). I’m fighting some sort of bug, remarkably similar to the one I had a month or so ago. Did laundry today. I need to get more organized in here (my office), but I’m feeling lousy enough I’m just not sure I’m up for it. But it’d be nice to have that done before hubby gets back, so he has room to move around while he’s putting up some shelving for me. Simba woke me up at too-damn-early this morning demanding to be fed. In other words, SSDD.

Monday was marvelous. My boss told our whiningest, complainingest, never-listeningest client to bother the vendor directly instead of bothering us. Then he told me to work from home tomorrow due to the impending ice age.

Slept three hours due to a twitching eye muscle, got up, got on a bus to DC, went to school for a meeting, meeting was canceled, went to class, am now at work until 11 p.m., tomorrow I have to be at school at 8:30 a.m.

Definitely too much time on my hands. Of late, I don’t get much writing done because I play Wii, surf the net, check email, read your blog… wash, rinse, repeat.

But, once I got to work, I got my chores done early, despite the supply truck running late, and during my break I finished the first draft of an article I’ve been working on. Seems I’m more productive when I’m not at home.

This Monday was just like any other Monday, spent resetting passwords and dealing with annoying clients, getting up way too early in the morning and freezing my butt off on the way to work. At least I had a good workout at the gym, wrote over 800 words for my first novel, wrote a blog post on The King’s Speech (very good movie you should go see it by the way), snuggled with two lovely kitties, and watched the season finale of Lie to Me which was very good.

So today started miserable but got better. Hopefully the next few days aren’t too bad, what with the SNOWPOCALYPSE bearing down upon us.

goddamn I hate mondays.
I have always purchased last years computer model when buying a pc. last kick ass desktop i bought ten years ago. i have been patching it ever since. two months ago, it finally shit the bed completely. I decide its time for me to get a cuttng edge pc. i hear intel has a new processor coming out. so i wait another month for that cpu to become available. i spent this weekend plugging it in and powering it up for the first time. installed a bunch of software on it. got it all set up just the way i want it.

today? intel announces there is a major flaw in the chip and theyre going to have to release a new chip.

After a typical Monday it began snowing at 4pm. An hour and half later it stopped leaving 10cm (4 inches) behind to ensure commuters a challenge on the evening trek home. Two dead by 7pm, so no complaints from me.

Too much time on my hands. Furiously refreshing my favourite blogs and sites hoping for updates to distract me from the fact that I don’t have enough work to cover my expenses this month. No pressure though, John. You just keep busy, and keep doing that paying work. Don’t mind us down here. You never call, you never write, you don’t care if we live or die. But we’ll be fine. Don’t you worry about us.

Monday has been awesome. Wrote the first few thousand words of my new novel. Made the most amazing turkeyburger burrito.

Now I’m going crazy trying to figure out how to configure WordPress so that I can post to different pages. I don’t want to resort to category pages, but would rather have a few live blog pages that I can designate take every which post. Garh!

Fred @ #6 and Andrew @ #22 — both of you are having hard days; my condolences. May you find comfort, eventually, in happy memories.

Half of the 8″ of snow forecast hasn’t showed up, yet, so it’s a much better Monday than I expected. A couple of sick or injured friends seem to be getting better. Wife & I had a great time at a party Saturday night, I’m a little stiff from too much dancing.

Spent most of Monday queuing for various bureaucratic things, and filling in an application form which crashed without saving after 3 hours. But managed to find some steak for dinner, and got a good 6 hours sleep so I’m now ready to take on Tuesday.

Well, I’m still at work at 10:10 p.m., where “work” is going to cover a suburban council meeting. And I got to work early because today is deadline day for our twice-a-week paper. And the council has now been arguing for about 10 minutes about berms and parking garages, which is why I have time to write this, so at least it looks like I’m typing.

But pretty soon I get to go home to the woman who can always make me smile, and my job is far from the worst, and I have savings in the bank, and I don’t have to riot in the streets for basic freedoms of speech, and I wrote a headline today with the word ‘crushed,’ referring to a building. So Mondays, maybe not that bad, yeah?

First day of the new semester, which means the University network went kablooey as 5000 people tried to log in to Outlook at once. This time it managed to snag the connection to the library’s ILS server on it’s way to the inky depths of the Internet. Took me and the Network guy an hour to restore. Matters were complicated because the vendor for our ILS basically has the server on lock down. This means that anytime I have to do something to the server, which lives in a closet behind my office, I have to call the vendor in California. That was my Monday.

…and now, at a little after 7pm, I’m going through my SFWA-related stuff, of which I am, I regret to say, a little behind and need to catch up.
It’s lucky for you that I took Monday off or I would be publicly nudging you for that thing you owe me.